Privacy Policy

Effective August 31, 2026 · Last updated August 22, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, share, and protect information in connection with "Ask Houser" (also called "Houser") (the "Service"), our marketing site at askhouser.com, and our application at app.askhouser.com.

This Policy uses certain defined terms — Service, Company, User, Customer, Content, Output, Subscription, and Subprocessor — that have the same meaning as in our Terms of Service. It should be read together with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy.

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1. Scope & Who We Are

1.1. Who we are. The Service is provided by Houser Technologies LLC, a Colorado limited liability company doing business as AI Housers ("Company", "we", "us", or "our"), located at 1281 E Magnolia St, Unit D #277, Fort Collins, CO 80524. We are the controller of the personal information described in this Policy, except where we act as a processor on behalf of a Customer (see Section 1.3).

1.2. Who this Policy is for. The Service is a business-to-business ("B2B") tool intended for affordable housing professionals — public housing authority staff, compliance officers, and owners/agents. It is not directed to consumers, pro-se tenants, or children. The Service requires Users to be at least 18 years old (see our Terms of Service). References to "you" mean the professional User accessing the Service or the organization (Customer) on whose behalf the User acts.

1.3. Controller vs. processor. For account, billing, and Service-operation purposes, we generally act as a controller. Where an organization (for example, an Enterprise Customer) provisions the Service for its personnel and submits Content through the Service, we generally act as a processor/service provider handling that Content on the Customer's behalf and subject to our agreement with that Customer. Where those roles conflict, the applicable Customer agreement governs the relevant Content.

1.4. Not affiliated with the government. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) or any government agency. The Service draws on public federal and state government materials, curated by Houser, but is an independent product.

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2. Information We Collect

We collect the following categories of information.

2.1. Account data (via Clerk). We use Clerk to authenticate Users and manage accounts. This includes information such as name, email address, password credentials (managed by Clerk, not stored by us in plaintext), organization affiliation, role, and authentication metadata (for example, sign-in timestamps and session identifiers).

2.2. Usage and log data. We collect usage and operational data, some of which may be personal information (such as IP address). This includes feature usage, message counts, request metadata, device and browser type, approximate location derived from IP address, IP address, and timestamps. We also collect error and diagnostic data through our error-monitoring provider (Sentry), configured not to capture message bodies. We use this to operate, secure, debug, and improve the Service.

2.3. Conversation and input Content. We collect and store the questions, prompts, documents, and other inputs you submit (your "inputs"), the answers and other Output the Service generates, and related conversation/chat history. Together, inputs and Output make up your Content. As explained in Section 3, the Service's automated screen blocks only certain identifiers; other personal information you choose to enter is stored as part of your Content and retained as described in Section 7.

2.4. Payment data (via Stripe). Paid Subscriptions are billed through Stripe. Stripe collects and processes your payment-card and billing information directly. We do not store full payment-card numbers. We may receive and store limited billing metadata from Stripe, such as your subscription tier and status, billing contact, the last four digits and brand of your card, and transaction history.

2.5. Organization / Enterprise data. For Enterprise Customers, we collect information needed to provision and administer the organization's account, such as team membership, seat assignments, administrator contacts, and configuration settings.

2.6. Cookies and analytics. We use strictly necessary cookies for authentication and session management (via Clerk) and a cookie that remembers your selected read-aloud voice. We use Vercel's cookieless, privacy-preserving analytics (aggregate page views and performance timing — no cross-site tracking cookies and no advertising use). We do not use advertising cookies or advertising technologies, and we do not "sell" or "share" personal information through cookies as those terms are used under U.S. state privacy laws.

2.7. Email you send or forward to us. If you email us, or forward correspondence to your personal Houser reply address (the Forward-to-Houser feature), we collect that email and its content, which may include correspondence from third parties (for example, a tenant's email you forward). For forwarded correspondence, structured identifiers (such as Social Security numbers, account numbers, phone numbers, and email addresses) are automatically replaced with placeholders before AI processing, and the content is stored in redacted form. Drafts generated from forwarded email are sent only back to the verified account holder who forwarded it.

2.8. Signature records. If you use the electronic-signature feature, we collect and store a signature record for each signer — such as the signer's name, the signature event's date and time, IP address, and browser information — to produce a tamper-evident signature certificate. Signers may include people who do not hold Houser accounts; the User who initiates a signature request is responsible for having the right to collect this information from those signers.

2.9. Voice features. Voice dictation is transcribed by your browser's speech service (audio is processed by your browser vendor, not sent to or stored by us). The optional read-aloud feature sends the text of the answer to our text-to-speech Subprocessors (Section 5.1) to generate audio.

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3. Sensitive Information & Our PII Hard-Block

We have designed the Service to minimize the personal information that flows into it. This section describes that posture accurately — please read it carefully, including its limits.

3.1. Do not input sensitive personal identifiers. We instruct Users not to enter sensitive personal identifiers — including tenant Social Security numbers, financial account numbers, and similar sensitive data — into the Service. The Service is decision-support for professionals; it does not need tenant personal information to function.

3.2. Automated PII hard-block (best-effort, not guaranteed). The Service applies an automated screen to typed messages and prompts that attempts to detect and block certain sensitive identifiers — specifically Social Security numbers and financial account numbers — from being sent to the AI models, and prompts you to remove them (on the email channel, structured identifiers are instead automatically replaced with placeholders — see Section 2.7). Documents you upload for ingestion (for example, organization document collections) are screened by the same hard-block: if these identifiers are detected in a document's text, the upload is rejected and nothing from it is stored or indexed. Detection in scanned documents depends on OCR quality, so this screen is likewise best-effort — do not upload documents containing these identifiers. This detection is automated and best-effort. It may not catch every instance and is not guaranteed. You remain responsible for not submitting sensitive personal information. Do not rely on the hard-block as a guarantee.

3.3. What the hard-block does not cover. The hard-block targets only Social Security numbers and financial account numbers. Other personal information you choose to enter — including names, addresses, household details, and case details — is not blocked. It is transmitted to our AI Subprocessors to generate Output (see Section 6), processed, and stored as part of your conversation Content and retained as described in Section 7. We cannot prevent Users from entering such information, and we do not block it. (The Service may show a best-effort warning when a message appears to contain a real person's details, but that warning is not a guarantee and does not block submission.)

3.4. Tenant identifiers we do not intend to receive. We do not intend to receive or store tenant Social Security numbers or financial account numbers, and the hard-block is designed to keep those specific identifiers out of the Service. This is not a representation that we hold no tenant-related personal information: as explained in Section 3.3, other personal information you enter is processed and stored. Because automated detection is imperfect, we also cannot guarantee that a blocked-category identifier will never reach our systems; where we become aware of such data, we will handle it consistent with this Policy and applicable law.

3.5. Not HIPAA-covered; data is still sensitive. We are not a HIPAA-covered entity or business associate, and the Service is not designed to receive protected health information. Housing-related information is nonetheless sensitive, and we expect Users to handle it responsibly and in accordance with their own legal obligations.

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4. How We Use Information

4.1. We use the information described above to:

• Provide and operate the Service, including authenticating Users, generating Output in response to your inputs, and maintaining conversation history;
• Secure the Service, prevent fraud and abuse, and enforce our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy;
• Support Users, including responding to inquiries and troubleshooting;
• Bill and manage Subscriptions through Stripe;
• Communicate with you, including transactional and account messages sent via Resend (for example, sign-in, billing, and service notices);
• Improve and develop the Service, including analyzing de-identified or aggregated usage trends, debugging, and evaluating quality (we do not use the substance of your Content to train AI models — see Section 4.2); and
• Comply with legal obligations and protect our rights and the rights of others.

4.2. AI training stance. We do not use your Content to train our own AI models. Your inputs are processed by our AI Subprocessors to generate Output; those Subprocessors' use of data is governed by their own terms and our agreements with them, which we summarize at the Subprocessors section of this Policy. We do not represent that any Subprocessor is contractually prohibited from using submitted data to train its models except to the extent stated in those published terms. See Sections 5 and 6.

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5. How We Share Information — Subprocessors and Others

We share information only as described below.

5.1. Subprocessors. We use the third-party service providers (each a "Subprocessor" and collectively "Subprocessors") below to operate the Service. Each processes information to provide its service to us under its applicable terms. The table below is the current, canonical Subprocessor list referenced by both this Policy and our Terms of Service; we update it when our Subprocessors change.

5.2. Legal and safety disclosures. We may disclose information if we believe in good faith that doing so is necessary to: comply with applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request; enforce our Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy; detect, prevent, or address fraud, security, or technical issues; or protect the rights, property, or safety of the Company, our Users, or the public.

5.3. Business transfers. If we are involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, bankruptcy, or sale of all or part of our assets, information may be transferred as part of that transaction, subject to this Policy or a successor policy with comparable protections.

5.4. No sale or sharing of personal information. We do not sell your personal information, and because we use only strictly necessary and preference cookies, cookieless analytics, and no advertising technologies (see Section 2.6), we do not "sell" or "share" personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising as those terms are used under U.S. state privacy laws. There is accordingly no sale or sharing for you to opt out of.

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6. AI Providers

6.1. How your inputs are processed. When you use the Service, your inputs (after the automated screen described in Section 3, which applies to typed messages, prompts, and the extracted text of uploaded documents, and blocks only Social Security numbers and financial account numbers) are transmitted to and processed by our AI Subprocessors to generate Output: OpenAI (GPT) for question-answering, text generation, drafting, review, summarization, and vision-based labeling of uploaded blank forms; Anthropic (Claude) as the alternate/failover model for those same purposes, used when the primary model is unavailable or when we route a feature to it; Voyage AI for converting questions and uploaded documents into search embeddings; Cohere for reranking retrieved passages; and, only when you use the relevant features, OpenAI (visuals generation, text-to-speech, audio overviews), ElevenLabs (text-to-speech), Recraft (image generation), and Tavus (training-video rendering). Our knowledge base draws on authoritative public regulatory sources (federal and state), curated by Houser.

6.2. Data-use commitments. We do not use your Content to train our own AI models. In addition, as of July 21, 2026, we have confirmed the following for each AI Subprocessor that receives your Content — through its standard commercial terms, an executed data-processing agreement, or an account-level data-use setting we have disabled: Anthropic and OpenAI do not train on API customer content by default; we have disabled the use of our content for model training in our Voyage AI, Cohere, and ElevenLabs accounts; and Recraft does not use API-generated content for training. (Tavus receives only Houser-authored training-lesson scripts — not your Content — and may use anonymized data for model improvement under its terms.) These commitments are made by each vendor under its own terms and our agreements with it; if a vendor's terms change, we will update this section.

6.3. Your responsibility. Because inputs are processed by these third-party AI providers, you should not submit information you are not authorized to share with them, and you should follow Section 3 regarding sensitive personal identifiers.

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7. Data Retention

7.1. We retain personal information for as long as needed to provide the Service, maintain your account and conversation history, comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements.

7.2. Indicative retention periods: we retain account data for the life of your account and delete it from active systems within approximately 90 days after you close your account; we retain conversation/Content while your account is open and delete or de-identify it within approximately 90 days after account closure (deleting a conversation in the app removes it from your workspace immediately, and the underlying records — including messages — are permanently deleted within approximately 30 days; account closure or a request to privacy@aihousers.com deletes them sooner); we retain usage and log data for approximately 12 months; and we retain billing records as required by tax and accounting law. When information is no longer needed, we delete or de-identify it, subject to backups that age out on a rolling basis.

7.3. Enterprise Customers may be subject to different retention terms under their Customer agreement.

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8. Security

8.1. We use reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational measures designed to protect personal information, including encryption of data in transit and at rest, role-based access controls, authentication managed by Clerk, and infrastructure provided by SOC 2-type service providers (such as Supabase and Vercel). No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

8.2. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure. We cannot and do not guarantee the absolute security of any information, and you submit information at your own risk. If we become aware of a security incident affecting personal information, we will provide notice to affected users and/or authorities to the extent and within the timeframes required by applicable law. For Enterprise Customers, notice will generally be provided to the Customer, who is responsible for notifying its personnel and other affected individuals.

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9. Your Rights & Choices

9.1. Access, correction, deletion, export. Subject to applicable law, you may request to access, correct, delete, or receive a portable copy of your personal information. Many of these actions can be performed directly in your account (for example, editing account details, deleting conversations, or closing your account; in-app export tools are available on paid plans, and any User may request a copy by email). To make a request, contact us at privacy@aihousers.com.

9.2. Account deletion. You may close your account at any time. Upon closure, we will delete or de-identify your personal information in accordance with Section 7, except where retention is required by law or for legitimate business purposes (such as billing records and fraud prevention).

9.3. Enterprise/organization data. If you access the Service through an organization, your administrator may control your account and Content, and certain rights requests may need to be directed to or fulfilled through that organization (which acts as controller of that data).

9.4. California residents (CCPA/CPRA). If you are a California resident, you have the right to know the categories and specific pieces of personal information we collect (described in Section 2), the sources and business purposes for collecting it, and the categories of third parties (our Subprocessors) with whom we share it; to request deletion or correction; to obtain a portable copy; and to not be discriminated against for exercising these rights. We do not "sell" or "share" your personal information (including for cross-context behavioral advertising), and we do not use sensitive personal information for purposes that would trigger a right to limit its use. To exercise a right, contact us at privacy@aihousers.com; we will verify your request as required by law.

9.5. Other U.S. state privacy rights. Depending on your state of residence (for example, Colorado, Virginia, Connecticut, Texas, and Utah), you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or obtain a copy of your personal information, and to opt out of certain processing. We do not sell your personal information or use it for targeted advertising. To exercise a right, contact us at privacy@aihousers.com. If we decline a request, you may appeal by replying to our response, and we will inform you of the outcome as required by applicable law.

9.6. Verification. We may need to verify your identity (and, for Enterprise Users, your authority) before fulfilling a request. We will respond within the timeframes required by applicable law.

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10. International Users & Data Location

10.1. The Service is operated from, and hosted in, the United States. If you access the Service from outside that region, you understand that your information may be transferred to, stored, and processed there and in any other country where we or our Subprocessors operate.

10.2. The Service is intended for and offered only to users located in the United States. We do not market or offer the Service to individuals outside the United States and do not currently rely on cross-border data-transfer mechanisms. If this changes, we will update this Policy.

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11. Children's Privacy

The Service is a professional B2B tool intended only for Users who are at least 18 years old (see our Terms of Service), and it is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. As a federal floor, we additionally do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 (or the minimum age required by applicable law in your jurisdiction). If you believe a person under 18 (or a child under 13) has provided us personal information, contact us at privacy@aihousers.com and we will take appropriate steps to delete it.

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12. Changes to This Policy & Contact

12.1. Changes. We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will revise the effective date above and, for material changes, provide additional notice as required by law (for example, by email or in-app notice). Your continued use of the Service after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the updated Policy.

12.2. Contact. If you have questions or requests regarding this Policy or your information, contact us at:

• Privacy: privacy@aihousers.com
• General support: support@aihousers.com
• Legal: legal@aihousers.com
• Mailing address: Houser Technologies LLC (d/b/a AI Housers), 1281 E Magnolia St, Unit D #277, Fort Collins, CO 80524

This Privacy Policy should be read together with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy.